One advantage to modeling the pose is that you can easily make sure that everything overlaps to ensure that the final figure is as strong as possible. (such as a hand resting on a hip should overlap even the tiniest to ensure that the connection point will be strong) If you pose it in figure mode you may not be able to do that. (depends on the rig though I suppose.) Additionally, certain fine details won't show in the figure such as wrinkled cloth from a raised arm.

Basically, if you need lots of prints of the same character in different poses then a rigged figure makes the most sense but certain "good printing" practices that I have heard of might be facilitated by modelling the pose.

This is all assuming that you are rigging in anim8or which does not have a cloth simulator or soft-body to skeleton rigging.

Hope this was helpful, I haven't done any 3d printing myself, but I have read a bit about it.

with 0 being a piece of (Fill in the blank)and 10 being a professional CGI masterpiece.

I would give yours a solid 6. as it is now.

with the Tweaking it could go to an eight at best a nine.

A good reference would be The movie Final fantasy Advent Children, it has a very similar type of epic animation to yours but the animation, although physics defying to an extent, still looks very believable.

Look especially at time one minute and thirty-five seconds when cloud is twirling around and fighting the monster thing. you will see just how smooth the animation is. please note that this movie was hand animated and did not use James Cameron's technology. (Wasn't invented yet). You will notice just how smooth the transitions between motions. Just see how his limbs move when he is fighting.

Sorry for not being clear, and I did not mean to bash your animation at all just to give some suggestions.

there is an animation school which has free videos online, Animation Mentor. By choppy i mean the smoothness and change of force are none existent. To explain: animating a scene where an is arm resting on a table which then is raised and slams down on the table. this animation poses several problems to the animator. the first is that if you simply animate the arm to raise up and swing down its going to be a constant motion which is in itself unrealistic and the second issue is that it wont appear to have any force when it hits the table even if it is moving at incredible speeds.

the solution to these two problems is by using ease in and ease out frames. animator does not have an easy click to do it for you. but it can easily be done with the graph editor or by hand. what i mean by ease in and ease out is when the arm is being raised from the table it will start slowly and then speed up and then slow to a stop as it reaches the zenith of its arc. then it instantly drops and accelerates as it hits the table. then you have it actually pass through the table a tiny amount and then quickly bounce it back at the wrist. this gives the motion a more powerful force that seems as though the table is actually being pounded.

Now, I am far from an expert on animation but simply tweaking the way the motion between the frames is being generated makes such a tremendous difference to an animation's realism. Just try it. Your animation doesn't need it but its the little secondary motions like these that give an animation its true believability.

Try it with a sphere if you don't believe me. one hour with animation mentor and my animations changed dramatically. (I have a basic sphere animation i did right after watching one of the lessons, i'll see if i can find it.)

once again, i'm not saying you animation is bad, on the contrary i think it is very good and that effort you put into it really shows. I'm just giving a recommendation that will help you in you animation skills.

Sorry if I sound too Harsh, it was not intentional. but that is what i meant by choppy.

looks great so far. i have tried to make a spartan at least 3 times. but the helmet is just too frustrating. additionaly, the armor is very complicated. i figured i might try sculpting it . good luck, he definitely is one of the harder characters to make that i know.

you need to be in scene mode in order to perform this action. then you can move the entire bone collection as an object while also animating the bones separately. they are two different parts of animating.